Arseny Zhilyaev

A writer, artist and political activist, Arseny Zhilyaev is concerned with art’s social and political legitimacy. This fiction chronicler/ reality inventor resorts to all kinds of political, scientific and museological strategies to explore the connection between art and social output.

Works

La vie moderne

The Aesthetic Complex of the Post-Sonet Oligarchy Period, 2015

For the Biennale, Arseny Zhilyaev has drawn on the Marxist “displays” of Alexey Fedorov-Davydov, who, in the 1930s, was known for his radical analyses of works of art and the social nature of artistic systems. As Zhilyaev explains, “His main idea was to show art of previous, and of course bourgeois classes, not in the museum white-cube, but in complexes of more or less typical interiors, or with combinations of furniture, sculptures and paintings typical of possible owners of that art. In addition to this, each complex provided information about the economic distinguishing factors of the owner’s class.’ Zhilyaev has taken inspiration from that avant-garde and has created, inside the macLYON, a reproduction of a modern collector’s interior. It is an opulent drawing room with expensive furniture and famous paintings (here, reproductions of pictures by Andy Warhol, Baldessari or Richter) – probably selected by an art adviser with good connections in the great auction rooms of the world. It adds up to a generic portrait of a new style of governing class, whose tastes are essentially dictated by the financial value of the objects they acquire.